A profanity laced blog about eating, running, CrossFitting, mothering, and whatever the hell else I feel like dumping into cyberspace.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Suck it, Sugar.

Well, after a super-fun Ragnar, I came home to what I thought were allergies and all the fun that goes with it. Sneezing, congestion, fatigue. Guess what? It was a miserable head cold instead. I was down for almost 4 days, with barely enough energy to work much less work out.

My CrossFit coach was so worried when I didn't show up for a week that he emailed me to make sure I was okay-isn't that nice? I cuss at him and wish he was dead 3 hours a week, and he misses me. Clearly he has abandonment issues.

I crawled out of my illness and back to the gym on Monday. I left feeling totally spent, but really happy to be back at it. Tuesday I went out for my very first FIRST training run (see what I did there-stupid runner humor). It was a speed session I'm supposed to use to determine my various training paces. I did a 1600m warm up @ 11:03, then 3x1600m with a 1 min walking cool down between them. I was sort of flabbergasted by the splits:
8:29
8:42
8:35
I almost barfed after the last one, so I walked 800m to cool down instead of running another 11. Still, these times kind of freak me out. I can't believe that I ran sub-9s. Especially 3 of them. I know, I know, FIRST training has a goal of getting each split no more than a second or two off the others, and these were a much wider margin, but they were all in the same neighborhood, even if they don't exactly share a stoop.

What does this mean for me? Well, my targeted split for speedwork is supposed to be the average of the three miles + 15 seconds. So that's....let's see....carry the two....the square root of Pi....8:35...+15...

8:50

Fuckballs.

The tempo run I was supposed to try the whole "warm up, then faster, then slower, then faster, then cool down" thing out on? Cancelled due to the twins conveniently getting croup. You know what croup is? A tiny little stupid mundane virus that causes a small child's vocal chords to swell up so much that they emit a loud barking cough. Their case was mild (no scary breathing, no ER visit), but croup gets worse at night. Much worse. They barked their little heads off all night long for three long nights. Let's just say I was too tired to to much of anything pretty much all last week. No CrossFit, no tempo run. Fail.

I went out on Sunday for my planned 10K loop from home. I was supposed to run 10:15ish miles based on the instructions in my training plan. Nice and slow and easy. So what did I do? I felt good, so I just ran how I felt. I should have heeded my brain when I looked down at the 5K mark and saw 27:01, but no. I listened to my stupid legs. Around mile 4.5 my guts started in "Ummm...hey, lady? I'm having a problem down here." My legs said "It's a side stitch! Run through it!", so I did until just past the 5 mile mark when my stomach started screaming "OH MAH GAH I'M GONNA BARF". Those 5 miles were done in 46:40. The total time for my 10K? 1:05 and change. Ouch. I almost tossed my cookies in the front yard of a house I run by every week. On a Sunday morning. They would totally have known it was me. Shit.

Oddly, that time still beats my PR for a 10K (I've only ever run one-5 years ago). Weird.

In the midst of all this illness, I found myself straying from the Paleo straight and narrow. I put sugared creamer in my coffee, mixed too much honey into my tea, ate a few too many Paleo brownies, and even ingested an enchilada and a cookie. The effect was frightening. That sugar? It was like fucking heroin. I felt completely out of control around it. If I didn't believe all the Paleo hoopla about modern foods being feats of engineering designed to fuck you in the head to the point where you couldn't stop eating them? I believe it now. It was scary. The sugar cravings came back hardcore...I became consumed with them. It got hard to pass by the donuts, I wanted froyo and pie with a can't-stop-thinking-about-it fervor. I was marginally successful in denying them, but I caved more than I'd like to admit. So what did I do? Found the 21 Day Sugar Detox by Balanced Bites. I'm on day 4, and feeling pretty well. I find myself only truly craving fruit (which, aside from green apples, is a no-no during the detox), which I'm taking as a positive sign. The crap food desire has subsided. Reset button pushed.

Suck it, sugar.

They say this thing is good for weight loss, but I'm not really too concerned with that. I don't particularly need to drop weight. I wouldn't cry if I got below 160, but I'm fine with hanging out at 162-ish. I'm hoping the ramped up protein consumption will help me do some fat-to-muscle conversion, though.

I do crave bacon. Good thing bacon isn't off limits.

A bunch of other stuff happened over the last week (I turned 35! Lily's first day of Kindergarten! Pat learns to poop on demand! Charlie masters air guitar!), but I'm out of time. Lucky you, you'll get to read about it later.

Do any of you fight sugar cravings? Have you thought about detoxing (or have you done it)?